Improved Heat Demand Prediction of Individual Households*

One of the options to increase the energy efficiency of current electricity network is the use of a Virtual Power Plant. By using multiple small (micro)generators distributed over the country, electricity can be produced more efficiently since these small generators are more efficient and located where the energy is needed. In this paper we focus on micro Combined Heat and Power generators. For such generators, the production capacity is determined and limited by the heat demand. To keep the global electricity network stable, information about the production capacity of the heat-driven generators is required in advance. In this paper we present methods to perform heat demand prediction of individual households based on neural network techniques. Using different input sets and a so called sliding window, the quality of the predictions can be improved significantly. Simulations show that these improvements have a positive impact on controlling the distributed microgenerators.